Saint Joseph Catholic Church

In a prominent front-page article in its May 13 edition, L’Osservatore Romano drew attention to the brutal Islamist insurgency in Mozambique.

“Recent violence in the north of the country has targeted missionaries and civilians—often farmers or miners—setting fire to homes and causing thousands of new displacements,” the newspaper reported.

Citing a Le Monde article, Ilaria De Bonis wrote that “the targets are exclusively the defenseless—specifically small village churches, missionaries living alongside the impoverished and their families, and society’s most marginalized and vulnerable members.”

“Nevertheless, the root cause of this violence—as our missionaries in Mozambique have maintained for years—is not religious hatred per se (though that certainly serves as an aggravating factor),” De Bonis added. “Rather, it stems from a complex mix of economic and political motives—not least the destabilization triggered by the foreign appropriation of the region’s surface and subsurface natural resources.”

Seventy-seven priests were ordained in South Korea in 2025—down from 90 in 2024, 118 in 2022, 147 in 2019, and 185 in 2017.

The Sunday Mass attendance rate also fell from 25% in 2015 to 15% in 2025.

The sole diocese in the Central American nation of Belize announced its opposition to a nationwide school-based HPV vaccination campaign.

“The Church affirms the value of the HPV vaccine and recognizes that it is ethically acceptable” but opposes the school-based campaign, the Diocese of Belize City and Belmopan stated on May 14. “The Church’s concerns are not about the vaccine itself, but about proportionality, parental rights, informed consent, and the sensitive moral context surrounding a sexually transmitted infection.”

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cna

The United States celebrates the Optional Memorial of St. Isidore the Farmer (1070-1130). He was a Spanish laborer who worked most of his life as a ploughman for a nobleman who lived near Madrid, Spain. Although working many hours a day, he never failed to attend daily Mass, and spend time praying before the Holy Eucharist. He married a maid-servant, Maria de la Cabeza, who was also canonized a saint. They were always willing to help their neighbors and worked with the poor in the city slums. In 1947, he was proclaimed the Patron of the Catholic Rural Life Conference in the United States.

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commentary

commentary

In an op-ed article,Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht in the Netherlands strongly criticized the Synod report on doctrinal issues, which included testimonies of men in same-sex marriages.

The report “fundamentally contradicts Catholic moral teaching and thoroughly undermines its application to moral conduct,” said Cardinal Eijk. “It relativizes the Church’s moral doctrine, with consequences that extend far beyond questions of sexuality to the protection of human life itself. This report must be forcefully refuted.”